Traditionally,
Marxists have described the Irish situation as being one in which
the island-nation is oppressed by its
neighbour and
where opposition to this oppression tends to be a progressive
struggle preparing
the way for – and, indeed, leading into – the
struggle for socialism. How this struggle is envisaged has
varied. At
first, Marx and Engels believed that its victory must await
that of the
British workers; later they supported the nationalist rising
of the Republican
Fenians in the 1860s; and, finally, they concluded that the
constitutional tactics of the Parnellite Home Rule movement,
which had start
ed to eliminate landlordism, could also subvert the imperialist
state
machine
that held the country. In their time, Lenin and Trotsky continued
to accept the Home Rule perspective, partly because most
of the landlords' holdings had been or were being purchased
by their
tenants.
After the Easter
Rising of 1916 had opened the way for a new and partially successful
national democratic revolution,
the
belief
that land reform
had blunted Irish revolutionary fervour disappeared: communist
leaders, including those such as Radek who had dismissed
Irish national claims
altogether, united to support the Irish Republic. What
is more, this support continued after the leaders of that Republic
had
signed it
away in the 1921 Treaty with Britain, leaving its cause
to
be upheld in arms by the majority of its military force
(the Irish
Republican
Army, or IRA), unsupported by the majority of nationalists.
Opposition
to the Treaty has been continued by Lenin and Trotsky's heirs
in the Fourth International. In particular,
although
it was not immediately clear that the partition of Ireland
was to
be the
core
of Britain's reformed domination of the whole country
(only Ireland's James Connolly, executed after the Easter Rising,
had foreseen
this), Britain's ability to surrender on everything else
has established this
truth. So not only does the Fourth Inter national stand
with those who fight for Irish unity and independence
with
all means
possible,
but it considers that their struggle must become one
for workers' power if it is to be successful.
This position
is consciously opposed by many, including some former anti-imperialists
in the
Irish labour movement.
Some
of these insist
that Irish nationalism was counter-revolutionary and
anti-democratic from the start, objectively if not
subjectively. Most would
accept it as generally progressive until the 1921 Treaty.
The subsequent
partition of the country is interpreted by them, however,
as being no more than
acceptance of the Ulster Protestant democracy's alleged
right to self-determination. Its justification is assumed
by reference
to
the undoubted Catholic
sectarianism of the present Republic of the nationalist
26 counties. That state's constitutional bans on abortion
and
divorce are
considered adequate explanations – and, for some,
excuses – for
the political and economic discrimination maintained
by the Ulster regime
and its proletarian supporters' readiness to follow
some of these islands' most reactionary politicians
in the
name of religion
against class.
After all, it is accurately remarked that most of the
Republic's workers are also tied to bourgeois parties.
The weakness of their
economic
base com pared to the Northerners' is not recognized
as a natural cause for this, or else it is used economistically
to prove northern
workers'
superiority rather than to start questioning why, with
their advanced base, their consciousness is backward.
All
this is held to prove the British dimension as either
non-existent or, at least, irrelevant. Irish
capitalism
is as strong as
it can be; its weaknesses are internal (and, if explicable,
due
mainly
to 26-County
Catholicism). If there is an outside imperialist
exploiter it is the United States of America, which threatens
all Western Europe
equally.
Irish-British relations are like those of Belgium
and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, Denmark and Germany:
states
formerly in
client-patron
relationship but now equal partners in the (West)
European Community. If the North of Ireland is to resolve its
problems, this will
be through democratic reforms enforced by Britain,
if from outside, and, in the
economic sphere, grubstaked by the EC and the USA.
The 26-County Republic can contribute only by suppressing
its irredentist
claim for Irish
unity. The fight for Irish unity will not only not
lead
to socialism, but is an undemocratic diversion from
that end.
The social context
for this viewpoint will be considered later. Here, it is enough
to say that it comes out
of 26-County conditions
as
much as those of the Northern Irish Protestant
working class. More to the
point in hand, it pro vides a challenge to revolutionary
preconceptions that has not been answered by the
largest Irish revolutionary
nationalist party, Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin's
failure makes it all the more necessary to answer
it here.
The British connection
Ireland's relationship to Britain cannot be explained
simply in the terms provided by Lenin in his
study Imperialism – the highest
stage of Capitalism. His central concept
of twentieth century clientelism through colonial
investment by metropolitan
capital has applied to
the North of Ireland since its foundation, but
has only been a systematic policy since 1950 when its local
industrial situation became more critical.
The Republic has only made serious efforts to
import capital since 1958. It is only since 1972 that its
successive governments have allowed
it to become a major debtor. Even now, three-fifths
of its debt (£15
billion) is owed to Ireland's own banks.
Yet this
formal metropolitan status cannot be separated from the
historical context preceding
the period
when it became
significant. Ireland was
exporting capital before its economy was strong
enough to benefit from such exports. Until
the 1960s, it believed
it
had no easily
worked raw materials – one of Lenin's
four main reasons to invest in a country. The
possibility
of reducing the price of land sufficiently
to justify its potential for foreign investors
was thwarted in the 1880s by a combination
of
foreign competition and rural agitation.
Labour, though relatively cheap compared to
Britain, was, at least from the moment of partition,
expensive
compared to its comrades in
Africa and Asia. However, even when the last
two factors – cheap
labour and land – were more encouraging
to investors, Lenin's fourth condition – scarcity
of capital – remained
self-perpetuating. Capital left underdeveloped
Ireland for the nearby London stockmarket and
the more secure and profitable holdings
of
mainstream imperialism.
This direct import
of Irish capital is only part (and a decreasing
part) of Britain's interest
in Ireland.
Its
rulers (at first,
just the rulers of England always had two
basic reasons for their occupation:
to milk its resources and to prevent it becoming
a military threat. Other reasons have come
and
gone: the lobby first
of Irish Unionists,
and then purely Ulster ones, influenced British
policy over the centuries (but it must now
be remembered bitterly
that
the executors
of that
policy know no permanent friends, only permanent
interests). On the other hand, military strategic
considerations
today include the possibility
that Ireland will not just handicap British
defence interests, but might yet become a
major social
revolutionary
threat
(‘Britain's
Cuba’, as feared most publicly by British
conservatism's right-wing, and less openly
by more powerful figures). This possibility
was apparent
at times during the 1919-21 Anglo-Irish War
and the subsequent
Civil War in the 26 counties, as well as during
the struggle of the last
twenty years.
Both these basic reasons for occupation can
be questioned and should be examined further.
Certainly,
the economic
cause has
changed
over the years. At first, in the Middle Ages,
it took the form of the desire
of England's aristocracy to obtain feudal
dues from Ireland's less-developed society.
Soon,
this was
reinforced by English
royalty's need for finance,
which became more important as its other
supplies were controlled by its parliaments.
Before
this could be
limited, feudal dues
had given
way to capitalist landlord ism for the British
landed interest. The landlords cleared their
estates, aided
by the 1846
famine, to produce
cattle for the British market. When this
was undercut by competition from the ranches
and
freezing factories
of
the new world, the
growth of British capitalism, industrial
and financial, had provided
a new conduit for Irish capital exports.
The nationally-owned Irish banks
had been founded during the nationalist agitation
of Daniel O'Connell in the early nineteenth
century with
the aim
of investing Irish
savings in projected local industries, under
an Irish parliament. In practice,
not only was the said parliament postponed,
but shortage of Irish coal and iron aborted
such
expansion in
the steam age.
The banks
proved
effective exporters of their investors and
depositors' funds. Eventually, when part
of Ireland did get
independence and tried
to build a
self-sufficient capitalist economy, the banks
blocked these plans and relied on their
depositors' fear of interference with their
economic self-interest to overcome their
mere patriotism
at the polls.
Today, Irish banks are ready to advance three-fifths
of the state's debt, but not to move their
investments out
of foreign
industry.
So special incentives are given to encourage
foreign firms to invest in
Ireland, with diminishing success. In this
process, it is certainly true that British
interests are
outnumbered
by those of the
United States: in 1988, new British investment
amount ed to a quantified £30m
out of a total £270.5m of foreign investment,
of which the USA had supplied £179m.
The point is that Britain does have an interest,
second only to that of the Americans. What
is more,
it
is close enough
to be the obvious choice as policeman for
all imperialist investors.
This links in
with the military issue. In 1169, Henry II of
England moved to prevent
his vassal,
the Earl
of Pembroke,
from doing
as Henry's great-grandfather had done
and establishing his
own independent
state
(then in England, now in Ireland) from
which to attack his liege lord. To block this possibility,
Henry
became ruler of
all Ireland,
as vassal
of the Pope. Neither he nor his heirs could
enforce their rule over the whole island
until after
they
had renounced
their
own vassalage
nearly four centuries later. Even then,
they could not secure its allegiance. So, to keep
down the
Catholic Irish, the English – and
later their partners, the Scots – settled
Protestants from their own island, most
effectively in the north-east. New insurrections
of the
natives led to Catholics being deprived
of most civil and political
rights during most of the eighteenth century.
The repeal of many of these penal laws
and the 1789 revolution in France raised
Irish
hopes,
the disappointment of which led to a rebellion
on a new, Republican programme. Its defeat
was followed by Ireland's incorporation
into a parliamentary union with Britain.
Complete
equal rights for Catholics
were promised but postponed long enough
to keep nationalist sentiment from dying.
New
uprisings once again impelled the senior
partner in
the union to jettison the Irish landlord
interest and then consider a federal relationship
(‘Home Rule’). This was blocked
by the north-eastern ‘garrison’.
A
new and more than ever before sustained
and broadly-based national democratic
revolution ended in a compromise
by which the garrison
was given its own federal relationship
within the union, while the nationalist
majority obtained what its leaders claimed
was a ‘stepping stone’ to
full independence, which it proved to
be if independence excluded territorial
unification.
The garrison
that forms the majority
in the province of ‘Northern
Ireland’ has kept it in being
so that the 26-County Republic can
enjoy
its neutrality without worrying the
British government.
Many would claim that Irish neutrality
is not such a cause of worry in
the nuclear age. In fact, countries
have been destabilized for less (notably,
the Micronesian island of Palau). No
country with
pretensions
to great power status is likely to
feel
happy, even now, about a neutral country
the size of Ireland relative to Britain,
that
blocks
its approaches,
unless it is neutral itself. As it
is, nuclear submarines belonging to
Britain
and other NATO powers are known to
patrol in the Irish
Sea. A united neutral Ireland would
be in a position to block such craft
passing through the North Channel between
Larne in the North of Ireland and Portpatrick
in Scotland, the narrowest and shallowest
sea division
between the two islands. To keep the
Channel open, the British
government has to control both its
shores;
it does so under the present status
quo.
So British imperialism
has an interest in Ireland that involves keeping it
divided. Only complete
and public
acknowledgement of its authority
by the rulers of allegedly independent
Ireland,
literal and
open acceptance of its satellite
status – including
entry to NATO – and
the maintenance of this position
for at least a decade could justify
Britain
allowing Irish unity. Ideally, it
would probably prefer such
a solution to the present instability,
or even the lesser instability that
existed before 1969. The trouble
is that, while the Republic's
response to the struggle to its north
has not been very favourable to the
freedom fighters, it has tended to
compensate for this over
the years by taking a firmer stand
on one issue open to it: neutrality.
This is arguably more formal than
real. NATO planes fly across Ireland
and
are even guided by a communications
beacon in west County Cork.
Nonetheless, such collaboration remains
covert – more so
than NATO desires. In the last 25
years, neutrality has been turned
slowly
but definitely from a bargaining
chip in negotiations for EC membership
into
a matter of principle. Over 80% of
the people
of the Republic
agree with this.
This makes it
all the more important for Britain to
maintain its alibi.
It will
not spurn the
wishes of
its garrison
population in the Six-Counties
of ‘Northern Ireland’ on
the basic issue of the province's
surrender to the Irish majority.
It might even have got away with
this had it been prepared without
mass or military duress on insisting
that the partitioned state be administered
according to full democratic
norms. Instead, from within a year
of partition, it left matters to
its garrison, the Ulster Unionists.
They had begun their fight against
Irish nationalism on an openly
anti-democratic and imperialistic
plat
form, denying the Irish the right
to self-determination. As the struggle
progressed, they organized around
the Orange Order, which had been
created to fight against the first
Irish Republic rising on that very
basis. Its central role as organizer
of Unionism made it impossible
for the North of Ireland to be
run save on a sectarian basis that
upheld
and extended the discriminatory
hiring practices common in the
area. Today,
Protestants have two-and-a-half
times better job prospects than
Catholics in all sectors. Britain
allowed this to happen – it
was interested in its security,
not Six-County democracy.
However,
after 1945, the British
welfare state was applied to
its province on
a non-sectarian basis,
without changing
its sectarian
politics (if
anything, they worsened) but
at the same time
raising hopes that they could
be ended peacefully. The
failure to fulfil
these
hopes
began
the present struggle. Although,
forced to make democratic reforms,
Britain's
good will
remains
suspect. Its
attempt to end the
basis of Orange power through
the Fair Employment Bill actually bans
positive discrimination in favour
of
Catholics. The only other way
to end discrimination, ‘levelling
up’, needs more more money
than is forthcoming – or
even more than the £500m
guaranteed by Britain and the United
States when Britain persuaded the
26-County regime to accept a consultative
role at Hillsborough in 1985 in
the Anglo-Irish Agreement. (Even
here,
only £130m has been paid
out.)
Building a revolutionary opposition
The vanguard of the struggle
against the occupation is – as
it has been from the beginning,
save for sympathetic upsurges
on specific
issues in the Republic – a
minority cross-section of the
Six-County minority. In this
cross-section, unemployed workers
and the younger
children of the petty-bourgeoisie
have a disproportionate influence
since they suffer most from the
area's sectarian hiring practices.
At the same time, such is the
institutionalised discrimination
at all levels that the local
national bourgeoisie is also
reasonably represented.
The result is a strong, active
revolutionary nationalist movement
representing 35%-40% of the Six-County's
nationalist population, with
a majority
in areas such as West Belfast
and the border regions of County
Armagh
and County Fermanagh and a significant
influence in those counties across
the border whose economies have
been weakened by partition. In
all, up to now the necessary
struggle for Irish unity is that
of the political minority of
the religious minority within
Ireland's
territorial minority.
This continuing three-fold minority
position of the revolutionary
nationalist movement
gives superficial
justification
to the arguments that
the crisis in the North of Ireland
can be ended in
the North of Ireland itself,
arguments that are not only
put forward
by pro-imperialists.
Whether this was ever possible
is doubtful; its current impossibility
is certain,
given the problems
of levelling
job opportunities
between the religious communities.
In practice, of course, this
cannot be
done without outside aid, either
to hold
the ring or to supply money to
level up the difference. For
most of its proponents, then,
the ‘internal
solution’ is an internal
United Kingdom solution.
The only support ers of an internal
Six-County solution (called,
significantly,
UDI à la lan Smith's
Rhodesia) are, spasmodically,
groups and individuals
adhering to extreme right-wing
Unionism who understand it as
an assurance of permanent Protestant
power.
The one further point about the ‘internal solution’ that
is advocated by all its supporters – from
the Communist Party of Ireland
(who hope to create the conditions
for selling Irish unity
to the Unionists) to the Loyalist
terror group, the UDA – is
the North of Irish Bill of Rights.
All the drafts of this include
provision allowing it to be suspended
by the provincial regime ‘in
case of emergency’. More
fundamental in the Bill's inability
to heal the the North of Irish
rift is the fact that such measures
cannot impose
unity on divided societies – indeed,
such Bills of Rights can only
function insofar as there is
agreement around the nature
of
the rights they guarantee. Such
agreement does not and cannot
exist on
a Six-County basis.
So the question confronting revolutionary
socialists must be: where can
Ire land's revolutionary
minority seek allies
if
it is to win?
Of course, there have been, and
still are, those who would insist
that
it does not
need to win
allies, only
benevolent
neutrals.
For them,
the war will be won by the Republican
movement's (the tern generally
used for the major
nationalist organization
Sinn
Féin and its
armed wing the Irish Republican Army – IRA) superiority of arms – notably
supplies of Libyan Semtex [plastic explosive], heat-seeking missiles
and superior mortars. The first objection to this argument is
that it supposes an aggressive armed struggle. Yet this is not
the basis
on which the Republican movement gains most of its support, but
rather because its arms protect the nationalist areas in the
North of Ireland
against even worse attacks from the British and Loyalists. Already,
it is doubtful whether the Republicans have the numbers to hold
the supplies they need and protect their people.
The second objection is reflected
in the fact that those who assert
the
possibility
of their
lone
victory can
also recognize,
unlike
the proponents of the ‘internal
solution’, Britain's
determination to keep its Irish
base. Such determination will
not be beaten by weapons
alone. As yet, Britain has been
able to fight a partly military
and partly democratic struggle;
it hopes to hold all the six
counties
and to win an internal settlement
satisfactory to it. However,
if the Republicans
ever looked like forcing its
withdrawal, Britain would be
able to take the offensive, rebuild
its bridges with the Unionists
and abandon
civil
rights to fight an immediate
and terrible war. This might
provoke
work ers in the 26-Counties,
as previous British atrocities
have done. Whether
this result would tip the scales
for Irish unity if achieved in
this way is doubtful, and becomes
more dubious the longer
the current
struggle is prolonged. More likely,
such a war would let Britain
lose the less-prosperous
Ulster hinterland west of the
River Bann, while it kept a more
secure position in the are as
of the largest Protestant majorities
on the
west shore of the North Channel,
with some population exchanges.
So the Republican movement, being
still the largest of all Irish
revolutionary bodies,
has a responsibility
to maximize
its support
outside of
its northern strongholds. It
has three
groups from which
it can choose, beyond its chances
of becoming a majority of the
Six-County
minority
which cannot be an adequate
substitute for any of the others.
The three
are:
o The northern Irish Protestant
majority;
o the national bourgeoisie in
the Republic;
o the working class in the Republic.
Only one of these provides the
correct strategic priority. Appealing
to
the Ulster Protestants
leads immediately
to the ‘internal
solution’. The vast majority of this community has no interest
in Irish unity other than as part of a socialist workers' republic
and, more to the immediate point, it cannot itself even make this exception
when such a republic is not on the obvious agenda. What is more, the
Protestant majority is particularly hostile to the Republicans’ armed
struggle, whose aim they think
is genocide against them. As
long as it continues on its present
offensive basis, its organizers
and
supporters
are the very last people among
whom the political leaders of
Ulster Protestant ism will seek
allies.
One group of former Republicans
have learnt this lesson with
disastrous results. At
the end of
the 1960s, influenced
by
the Moscow-line
Stalinist par ties (they were
then divided along the border),
the
then
united
Republican movement helped to
initiate a campaign for limited
political
reforms that
would give
equal rights
to both
communities, mainly
through the practices already
working in Britain. Although
these did
not attempt to change the job
discrimination on which
the North of Ireland is founded,
they did
attack
directly
a number of discriminatory
practices,
particularly
in housing, and started a chain
reaction
that exploded when the Orangemen
and their state
forces tried
to impose
military
control
on the Catholic
areas of Derry and Belfast in
August 1969. Their inability
to do this
immediately led to the reinforcement
of the British Army garrison
and its use as a police force.
Indirectly, it also led to the
Republican movement
splitting, the minority
reverting
to the
more traditional
armed struggle strategy that,
as the only
movement, it continues today.
The majority continued to develop
the strategy of the ‘internal
solution’, refining it
so that it became centred around
the North of Irish Bill of Rights.
However, it began to go beyond
its
inspirers
of the now-united Communist Party
of Ireland (CPI). This group
was content to insist on its
strategy's reformist nature against
the
revived armed struggle.
The majority ‘Official’ Republicans went further. On the
one hand, they refused to limit themselves to the CPI's wish that they
should be the party of the national democratic stage of the struggle,
and proclaimed themselves its socialist vanguard. On the other hand,
seeing that the ‘internal solution’ was failing to win
over Protestant workers, they have chosen to intensify their commitment
to its principle: concentrating on appealing to and apologizing for
Unionism (one of their most sophisticated ideologists, Henry Patterson,
sees anti-Catholic sectarianism as a major source of socialism); liquidating
their army; abandoning the name Sinn Féin (they are now the
Workers' Party); and attacking Sinn Féin itself as ‘fascist’.
This has earned them exemption from Orange strictures against
Republicanism, without winning them more Protestant support.
Subsequently, they
have lost nearly all their former influence among the North of
Irish Nationalist
minority. Their socialist programme has, however, won them votes
and seats in the Republic where the Labour Party is only just
breaking from a period of 17 years of collaboration with the
least nationalist
of the major capitalist parties.
One thing should be added. The
fact that the Ulster Protestant
community,
even
the workers
within it,
are not immediate
allies in struggle
against imperialism does not
mean that they will always oppose
it.
The Ulster
Protestant working class has
had a developed economic base
for longer
than the work
ers in any other
part of Ireland.
It has
produced labour
leaders who compare favourably
with most of those elsewhere.
Its weakness
is that
the conditions
that created this
base also revived
the sectarianism
that negated its effects: the
best leaders of
Ulster Protestant workers have
tended to be more politically
isolated within their community
than other Irish labour leaders.
This
can not always be. Faced with
a genuine secular
socialist
revolutionary
movement
that
hegemonizes the mass of Irish
nationalist workers and seeks
state power actively – a
movement that has not yet been
seen in Ireland, but this does
not mean that it is impossible – then
it can be expected that Ulster's
workers of both traditions will
unite in a higher cause than
that of political rights within
one union.
The Stalinists of the CPI do
not limit their stagist perspective
just to the
North of
Ireland. This
is but one part of a
three-stage strategy,
the second being Irish unity
and
the third socialism (on a united
Ireland
basis, of
course, but not
beyond this).
This
enables
the Party to see
its first stage in separate parts,
north and south. What this means
is that while
they seek
Unionist
allies in
the north
they work
for an apparently contradictory
nationalist alliance in the Republic.
In
their schema, full political
democracy in the North of Ireland
will be
the condition in which
Unionists
will
become democratic
nationalists.
This underestimates the base
of Unionism. What is more, it
overestimates
the
nationalism of
the Irish
bourgeoisie
as it
has developed
outside the North of Ireland
since 1921.
In the smaller area, conditions
have maintained the revolutionary
potential
of bourgeois
nationalism; in the larger area,
this potential is practically
extinguished outside the border
counties. In the Republic, the
capitalists have
built a secure
base,
with an economy
more separate
from that
of the North of lreland than
it is from that of Britain.
This base expanded
industrially in the 1930s under
policies of self-sufficiency
initiated by
Fianna Fáil. the constitutional
heir of the militant opponents
of the 1921 Treaty. By the end
of the
1950s, the policies necessary
to ensure economic independence
were too radical for Irish capital.
The economy was reopened to multinational
firms with immediate, if short-lived,
success as far as unemployment
was concerned.
From the
end of the 1960s unemployment
has tended to increase, while
in this decade it has engendered
a rise in emigration for the
first
time
since the 1950s.
Despite this, the capitalist
classes enjoy a measure of stability
that
is threatened
by the
activities
of their
fellow nationalists
in the
North of Ireland. Early in this
struggle, to stave off its spread,
they attempted
to reduce
economic
discontent with increased
government
expenditure, which has increased
the national debt to
a level where it has come to
be perceived as an even greater
destabilizer
than
the national struggle. So, since
1982, the debt has been attacked
by a
series of retrenchment policies.
At the same time, the more consistent
constitutional
nationalists have been
reassured by measures such
as the 1984 nationalist forum,
which formally reasserted
the
aim of Irish
unity, and then by the 1985 Hillsborough
Agreement, which gave the Republic
an institutionalised although
purely
consultative
role in
the British-occupied area. This
Agreement was
signed by representatives of
a coalition of the old pro-Treaty
party,
Fine Gael, and
the Irish Labour Party. Its limitations
were recognized and denounced
by Fianna
Fáil, then in opposition.
But in 1987, Fianna Fáil
was returned to power and has
since operated as though it never
had any
doubts.
All sections of the Republic's
bourgeoisie agree about seeing
Ireland's future
through the perspective
of
being part of the
(West) European
Community, which it values as
a source of funds. In fact, such
funds
do not
compensate the Republic
for
its outflow
of public
funds.
The Community is offering the
whole of Ireland
a lump sum of £4 billion,
slightly more than two years
interest on the Republic's foreign
debt (£1.8 billion). Furthermore,
this money will have to be spent
on reconstructing the island's
roads to bring them up to
West European
standards. All that can be said
for the EC's generosity is that
it is considerably greater than
that of the United States.
This account of the development
of 26-County capitalism could
be portrayed as the
history of a developed,
if inefficient, metropolitan
bourgeoisie. This is, indeed,
the interpretation made by the
Socialist Workers' Movement (SWM),
the Cliffite (‘state capitalist’)
group, which is one of the largest
non-Stalinist and non-Republican
groups on the Irish revolutionary
left. For the SWM, since 1921
the 26 counties have enjoyed
as much control over their economy
as is compatible
with capitalism. From this, it
follows that it is capitalism
rather than national oppression
that is, subjectively as well
as objectively,
the primary enemy of the Irish
revolution. The country is too
advanced for any strategy of
permanent revolution – socialist
struggle emerging out of the
democratic one – in the
sense that it may have succeed
ed elsewhere. Irish unity and
secular democracy are secondary,
if unavoidable, demands, with
the struggles to achieve them
simply ‘part
of the necessary training of
the working class to fight oppression’ (Socialist
Worker, January 1989).
The economic facts that underpin
this argument are unimpressive.
A large
proportion of
them depend on
the strength of
the native banks, still claiming
their three-fifths of the
national debt.
However,
in
the first place, national oppression
is not linked directly to economic
factors – for example,
Catalonia and Euzkadi have been
relatively prosperous parts of
Spain. What is more,
Irish banking was even stronger
and more independent of Britain
at the time of the Anglo-Irish
War. Today, all Irish banks,
with one possible exception,
are controlled
by British interests. And the
one doubtful one (but the biggest),
the Bank of Ireland, has at least
40% of its stock in British hands.
They
were more independent in 1921.
Even so, then as now, founded
to fund an industrial revolution
that lacked the raw materials
to exist,
the banks were as much an instrument
of national oppression as of
capitalist
exploitation. They syphoned off
capital resources that could
have been used to fund jobs for
those who were forced to emigrate
to find
work,
whose earnings since 1921 could
have provided only positive payment
balances. The importance of the
banks to their depositors in
what was, until the 1960s, a
predominantly peasant society
has made it
impossible
for the constitutional heirs
of the anti-Treatyites to deal
with them. The most definite
challenge to the banks, by the
constitutional
Republican
Clann na Poblachta in 1948, almost
certainly lost it both votes
and seats.
Here again, it is clear that
what Wolfe Tone, Irish Republicanism's
ideological
ancestor,
called ‘breaking the connection
with Britain’ must
mean breaking Irish finance capital.
And while schematically the reverse
can be said to be true, the history
of the last 20 years shows that,
by spreading the struggle for
unity against the uneasy stability
that justifies capital's resistance
and the divided state power that
defends
it, revolutionaries can overcome
the opposition of the banks and
their depositors. Without the
national struggle as the booster – in
effect, if this struggle is defeated – no
anti-capitalist revolution is
likely to succeed in Ireland
for many years.
Before 1922, two out of three
national general strikes were
around demands
connected to
the national cause.
Since then,
the only
general stoppage unconnected
to the northern issue was an
impressive
but isolated and unsuccessful
one for a
better
deal for workers contributing
to the Pay As You Earn (PAYE)
taxation
scheme. The Socialist Workers'
Movement
warns
against socialist
revolutionaries ‘riding
the nationalist tiger’.
The danger is there, of course:
the last years of national revolutionary
downturn have seen the swallowing
of
socialist revolutionaries – and
in many cases, their digestion – by
the said tiger. The point is
that these have been years of
downturn. Similar phenomena occurred
at similar moments during and
after
the Anglo-Irish War. When the
struggle takes off again, an
inevitable condition and result
of this remobilization will be
the development
of the nationalist
struggle towards a socialist
perspective.
There is another reason given
(although not used by the SWM)
for denying
the subjective political
priority
of
Irish unity.
This
is the sectarian
nature of the state established
and ruled by the leaders of those
who
fought for
Irish
independence
and unity.
The results
of the
referenda on abortion and divorce
have had a demoralizing
effect on many democrats'
aspirations for a united Ireland.
In fact, the fighters in the
Anglo-Irish War did
not have
strong views
about keeping
their
state free of birth
control and divorce. The Catholic
hierarchy did not support the
freedom fighters in this struggle, lest
it open its divisions (after
all, most
of its
members were constitutional ‘Home
Rule’ nationalists).
It could unite only to support
the Treaty, albeit with necessary
token protests against partition.
In the new state, with more than
90% of
the population Catholic, it was
natural that the majority Church
be in a strong position. Natural,
too, that successive 26-County
governments
keep in with it by ensuring that
their decisions were guided by
it, particularly on sexual matters.
Today, Catholic dominance
of the
26-County state is a necessary
part of that state's stability
within the partition
settlement; its political base
is strong because of partition.
This does not mean that clericalism
can be ignored, any more than
that opposing
partition
means accepting
capitalist
economics.
Not
least
of the weaknesses of the Communist
Party's appeal to the 26-County
national bourgeoisie is that
it accepts
the
degree to which
they are tied to clericalism.
Indeed, once partition had been
imposed,
it was
the constitutional heirs of the
Anti-Treaty fighters – Fianna
Fáil and Seán MacBride's
supporters of the smaller Clann
na Poblachta – which tended
to indulge in Dutch auctions
of sectarianism to keep the priests
quiet on their nationalist demands.
In the last
20 years, this historic fact
has provided the excuse, and
the current national struggle
the opportunity, for many pro-imperialists
to assert
themselves as leaders of the
only democratic causes open to
them: the struggles for the right
to abortion and divorce. In the
campaign for
divorce, its leaders' extreme
hostility to revolutionary nationalism
was a factor in its defeat. This
hostility was particularly shortsighted
because Sinn Féin does
not lean towards clericalism
and has the firmest pro-abortion
position of all the major Irish
parties. (It
is its offensive military strategy,
involving attacks on Protestant
non-combatants, particularly
by the former West Fermanagh
Brigade of the IRA, that gives
Republicanism its sectarian label.)
The Communist
Party is trying to sell the national
struggle not to the genuine democrats
who campaign for women's rights,
but to the bigots who oppose
them. It advises Sinn Féin
to ally with people who believe
that Irish unity can be achieved
under the Republic's clerically
limited constitution,
many of whom would not want it
otherwise. The radical support
for abortion and divorce rights
(33% in the two referenda, against
Sinn Féin's
2% in the Republic's general
election) is to be ignored.
Finally, as for the Republic's
national bourgeoisie, the cultural
expression
of its inadequacy
both as a nationalist force and
a developed imperial
metropolis is its active role
as patron to the opponents of
its expansion.
Such opponents
exist
in all states.
In the
Republic, the smallness
of the milieu and the continuing
limitation
of higher education
to a bourgeois elite comprising
a smaller share of the state's
population
than elsewhere, has helped ensure
that
a monolithic view of the Irish
situation is
enforced in
academic and media
life.
The bourgeoisie's
single-minded intellectual dumping
of the struggle that led to the
founding of its state may seem
strange until it is understood
that
the majority of this class has
always accepted the Treaty as
its title
to state power.
Its new enthusiasm
is benefiting
it. Over
the last
two decades, the power of its
state against civil liberties
has grown
with little
protest, since
this growth has
been directed
specifically
against Republicans.
The national democratic revolutio
